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White Sauce (Cook together until well mixed)
Cook together until well mixed, one tablespoonful of butter and one teaspoonful of flour, add a cup of sweet cream, simmer five minutes, add minced parsley, season and serve.
A cream sauce rather than a true béchamel, the roux is here almost incidental, since the reduction of the cream does most of the thickening. A few notes on the proportions and terms.
- "Sweet cream"This means fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the soured or ripened cream common in period kitchens. Use heavy cream; light cream or half-and-half will not reduce to a coating consistency in five minutes.
- The flour is deliberately scantOne teaspoon of flour to a cup of cream is barely a thickener; it serves more to stabilise the cream than to build body. The usual household proportion for a white sauce was nearer a tablespoon of flour to a cup of liquid, so this sauce is meant to stay thin.
- Cook the flour firstThe recipe says only "cook together until well mixed," but the intent is presumably a smooth butter-and-flour paste; a short cooking over low heat before the cream goes in helps take the raw edge off the flour.
- Keep it below a boilSimmer here means bare movement at the edges. With this little flour, hard boiling risks the cream breaking, so hold it back to a gentle simmer.
- Season means salt and white pepperSeason means salt and pepper -- White pepper was the conventional choice in a pale sauce, to avoid dark specks. A grating of nutmeg appears in many related cream sauces of the period.
- Parsley last, off the heatMinced parsley added at the end keeps its color and its raw green edge; simmered in, it turns drab and grassy.
- YieldAbout one cup. It thickens further as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of stock or cream.
A butter-and-flour base moistened with liquid had, by the nineteenth century, settled into a household formula in English-language cookbooks: melt, mix, add milk or cream, simmer, season. Where milk is used it is usually called white sauce or b"as here, it becomes a richer thing meant for delicate meats. Rich, mild and pale, a cream sauce was a common foil for roasted or broiled birds, and the parsley supplied colour. Recipes this short were common in cookbooks of the period, which assumed a cook who already knew what a sauce should look like and needed only the proportions.